Thomas Ahnert

Francis Hutcheson and the Heathen Moralists

Throughout his career Hutcheson praised the achievements of the pagan moral philosophers of classical antiquity, the Stoics in particular. In recent secondary literature his moral theory has been characterized as a synthesis of Christianity and Stoicism. Yet Hutchesons attitude towards the ancient heathen moralists was more complex and ambivalent than this idea of ‘Christian Stoicism’ suggests. According to Hutcheson, pagans who did not believe in Christ and who had never even heard of him were capable of virtue, and even, he asserted controversially, of salvation. Yet Hutcheson did not think that the virtue of pagans, let alone their salvation, was a result of their moral philosophical theories. Hutchesons applause for pagan philosophy as an intellectual achievement did not indicate a commitment to it, but was based on a detached and cautious evaluation that involved significant reservations concerning the truth and usefulness of pagan ethical thought.

The Moral Education of Mankind: Character and Religious Moderatism in the Sermons of Hugh Blair

“Character” very often had a significant religious dimension, which was not separate from its other, more secular, moral aspects but intimately related to them. This chapter will focus on the relationship between the religious and the moral philosophical uses of character in the writings of one of the most prominent clergymen of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hugh Blair (1718–1800), a minister of the High or New Kirk in St. Giles’s Church in Edinburgh from 1758. Blair was one of the so-called Moderates in the Presbyterian Church, a group whose members were distinguished firstly by their advocacy of lay patronage in the appointment of ministers, whereby a candidate for the ministry was presented to the congregation by a secular patron, who sometimes was not even a Presbyterian. The purpose of this measure, which had been reintroduced into Scottish ecclesiastical life by the Patronage Act of 1712, was to prevent the appointment of dangerous religious “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” as Presbyterian ministers. The Moderates were opposed by the “orthodox” or “Popular” party, who favored the election of ministers by local congregations, without external interference.1 Aside from these controversies over ecclesiastical procedures, however, the Moderates are also considered representatives of a more enlightened and polite culture that incorporated many recent philosophical ideas, whereas the orthodox have been associated with an old-fashioned, inflexible, and dogmatic Calvinism.

Clergymen as Polite Philosophers. Douglas and the Conflict between Moderates and Orthodox in the Scottish Enlightenment

Taylor and Francis RIHR_A_332094.sgm 10.1080/17496 70802319276 Inte lectual History Review 749-6977 (pri t)/1749-6985 (online) Original Article 2 08rnational So ety for Intellectual History 8 30 0002008 hom sAhne t . hnert@ d.ac.uk This article examines a series of polemical exchanges within the mid-eighteenth century Presbyterian Church of Scotland that provide an interesting example of the articulation of philosophical and religious personae in the Enlightenment. These disputes took place between the ecclesiastical factions of the so-called ‘orthodox’, or ‘Popular Party’, and the ‘Moderates’. The two were distinguished firstly by their respective positions on ecclesiastical appointments. In 1712 the Patronage Act had been passed by the British parliament, restoring the pre-1649 procedure for filling vacant churches. According to this procedure a secular patron (often a local landowner and not even necessarily a Presbyterian) presented a candidate for the ministry to the congregation, and the congregation was expected to acquiesce in the patron’s choice. The Moderates firmly supported this principle of lay patronage; they were opposed by the ‘orthodox’ or ‘Popular’ party, who believed that the 1712 Act compromised the independence of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, and who favoured the election of ministers by local congregations, without external interference. The disagreement came to a head in 1753, when the Moderates, led by William Robertson in the General Assembly, brought about the expulsion of the orthodox Thomas Gillespie of Carnock, who refused to install a clergyman imposed on the parish of Inverkeithing.1 Aside from these disagreements over ecclesiastical politics, there are also broader differences between the respective ideas and beliefs of the two parties. The Moderates are generally seen to have had a greater affinity than the orthodox to the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. Several Moderate figures enjoyed a national, even European reputation in the eighteenth-century world of letters. The clergyman William Robertson, for example, was ranked with Voltaire, David Hume and Edward Gibbon as one of the most eminent historians of the midto late eighteenth century; Hugh Blair, a minister in St Giles’s Church, became the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-lettres at Edinburgh in 1759; and the moral theorist and historian Adam Ferguson had served as a military chaplain, before being appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1764 and, in 1767, publishing his famous and influential Essay on the History of Civil Society.2 While Moderates did not necessarily agree in every respect with the ideas of figures such as David Hume or Lord Kames, they did block an attempt by the more conservative

De Sympathia et Antipathia Rerum : Natural Law, Religion and the Rejection of Mechanistic Science in the Works of Christian Thomasius

Natural law theory in the early Enlightenment often is closely related to other fields of early modern learning, such as theology or natural philosophy. Boundaries between different disciplines were highly permeable and scholars frequently strove to integrate disparate areas of knowledge in a coherent world-view. It was, therefore, not unusual for the same ideas and arguments to be used in different areas, which would now be regarded as separate and unrelated. Hobbes, Boyle, More, Cumberland, Spinoza, Descartes and Leibniz1, to name only a few, all believed that questions of natural philosophy, law and theology were intimately related to each other. The purpose of this article is to examine this relationship between natural law theory, religion and science in the case of the philosopher and jurist Christian Thomasius.

Introduction: Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment

“Character” has a long history and a dense literature. In both its general and particular manifestations it permeates the writing of the Greek and Roman classical authors that formed the basis of eighteenth-century education and by which cultural standards were set. Ethical norms, both public and personal, deferred to the authority and the examples of Tacitus, Cicero, and Seneca. The dominant mode of character writing in the West at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the Theophrastan ethical type, derived from short studies of Greek personalities construed by Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. Theophrastus’s exemplary figures included the Boor, the Loquacious Man, the Social Parasite, the Miser. A sixteenth-century text of Theophrastan fragments prompted English sketches such as Samuel Butler’s Characters of 1667–79 (published in 1759) and the Caracteres of La Bruyere. Character in this context is defined by public manifestation; it is a functional and rhetorical product of characterization, character-as-represented either by oneself or by another. These were portraits—images—in words of ethical types. Alexander Pope’s Moral Epistles, for example, took a broadly Theophrastan line: the “Argument” to the first, “Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN,” outlines the semantic range of the term: Some Peculiarity in every man, characteristic to himself, yet varying from himself…Some few Characters plain, but in general confounded, dissembled, or inconsistent…The same man utterly different in different places and seasons…No judging of the Motives from the actions…Yet to form Characters, we can only take the strongest actions of a man’s life, and try to make them agree: The utter uncertainty of this, from Nature itself and from Policy…Actions, Passions, Opinions, Manners, Humours, or Principles all subject to change…It only remains to find (if we can) his Ruling Passion.1

ENTHUSIASM AND ENLIGHTENMENT: FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE THOUGHT OF CHRISTIAN THOMASIUS

“Enthusiasm” has been described as the intellectual opposite of the Enlightenment, its “anti-self”. It stood for a religion of the “heart” rather than the “head”, and was associated with the extreme, millenarian sects on the fringes of established Protestantism. The relationship between religious enthusiasm and enlightened philosophy, however, could be closer than is often thought. Here I focus on the example of the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who is considered to be one of the first and most influential representatives of the early Enlightenment in Protestant Germany. Usually, Thomasius is described as a sort of classical enlightened thinker who separated the question of religious truth from the pursuit of secular philosophy, and it is implied that the interpretation of Thomasiuss religious beliefs contributes little, if anything, to the understanding of his philosophical views. His religious views, however, not only were regarded by contemporaries as an example of religious “enthusiasm”. These “enthusiastic” religious beliefs were also more important to his philosophy than is often argued. They were part of a programme for religious and intellectual renewal and reform which, Thomasius believed, would prepare the reform of Lutheran philosophy from the obsolete, “scholastic” intellectual traditions it had inherited from the papal church. This essay examines the often complex development of Thomasiuss religious views in their historical context and their significance for his wider “enlightened” intellectual interests.